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Pierce Sioussat is a veteran marketing specialist and entrepreneur with a unique combination of corporate new product development marketing experience and a deep knowledge of the natural products industry. After holding executive positions with Ogilvy & Mather advertising as well as the Citibank Consumer Banking Division, Pierce entered the natural products industry in 1994 working with his father-in-law Paul Ross …

In the first half of the show, Dr. Rasmus reviews key economic events of the past week, including the collapseof ‘Banco Popular’ bank in Europe and what it might mean in coming weeks to Europe’s fragile banking system, the emerging problems in Junk Bonds and the retail sector in the US, renewed falling oil prices, the US House passing the …

Dr. Rasmus reviews early policy directions of newly elected French President, Emmanuel Macron, that focus on anti-labor reform, business tax cuts, and privatization and how that set of policy priorities is similar in many ways to Trump’s. How recent reports on unemployment in Europe show jobless rates at 18% (not 9.5%) while the US rate is really 9%-12% and not …

CONVERSATIONS WITH REMARKABLE MINDS
A Manifesto for a Green Mind – a look at our civilization’s alienation from nature and its consequences and the neuroscience and benefits of learning to cooperate with Nature and the environment

“Updates on FED and interest rates, new US and China inequality data, BLS on wage stagnation, Ford and GM build factories in China, more Big bankers join Trump. Interview with Walter South on US housing crisis.”

The Fed raised interest rates again this past week. Jack explains it has little to do with it having reached its inflation or employment targets, but represents the major policy shift underway by US economic elites. From Fed low interest policy for eight years subsidizing stock, bond and financial assets—and thereby corporate and investor profits and incomes of the wealthiest 1%–the shift now underway is to subsidize profits and incomes of the 1% by cutting taxes, deregulation, and moderate infrastructure spending. Sustained low Fed rates were beginning to cause more instability in financial markets after 8 years. They played their part in boosting profits and incomes; now another policy ‘mix’ is emerging. Jack shows how Fed 2% inflation and job targets are phony justifications for Fed low rate policy continuation; how and why long term rates which the Fed doesn’t control will continue to rise, and what the global responses and effects in Europe, Japan and China will be to the new Fed direction. Will the Fed be used by the US economic elite to check Trump? Possibly.

In today’s show, Jack puts Trump strategy and policies in historical perspective, showing how his proposed programs are rooted in policies initially proposed by Nixon and Reagan. Trump represents the latest in a series of corporate-radical right initiatives to restructure economic and political relationships periodically with US foreign competitors and to contain domestic challenges. Nixon’s NEP program of 1971, and …

Dr. Rasmus discusses how the intensifying attacks on Trump administration represent an historic internecine conflict between old and new wings of the US ruling elites and not ‘democracy vs. fascism’. Rasmus offers an analysis of the first month of the Trump regime and its growing conflicts with the Media, the ‘deep state’ 17 intelligence communities, federal state bureaucracies, and political parties of Democrats and moderate Republicans. Revisiting his November article ‘Tameing Trump’, Rasmus explains the meaning of last week’s firing of NSA Flynn, Trump’s backtracking on China, his reassuring Canada and Japan prime ministers on trade, and his revisiting of his muslim country travel bans. How the Flynn affair was a warning ‘shot across the bow’ for Trump to back off his proposed foreign policy changes with Russia and NATO. How the US spends $700billion a year subsidizing NATO and Europe and how US control of NATO is key to control of Europe politically and economically. The policy areas of conflicts between Trump and the old elites. Rasmus explains how old neoliberal elites (media, parties, spy agencies, state bureaucracies) continue to build a case on Trump and either ‘tame’ him or dump him—but only after he delivers on massive corporate-investor tax cuts, deregulation of healthcare and banks, and checking his trade initiatives. The grass roots base of Trump vs. old elites is discussed.

Jack Rasmus invites guest, Alan Benjamin, to discuss the pending April-May elections in France. How goes France goes Europe, the saying goes. Will Le Pen’s right wing National Front Party pull off a ‘Trump Surprise’ and win the elections, pulling France out of the European Union as she promised? Will the independent Macron united the remnants of capitalist parties and right wing social democracy in the Socialist Party and win? What is the ‘united left’ in formation in France? What does it mean by ‘left frexit’. Benjamin provides a ‘on site’ analysis from his work in Europe and France today not available in mainstream media. Rasmus and Benjamin discuss the collapse of traditional social democracy in Europe as it has aligned with European Neoliberalism and the rise of both right wing populist parties and emerging left wing alternatives. The positions of all the major parties in the French election are explained. Comparisons to the UK Labor Party, Germany’s SPD and AfD, Spain’s Podemos, and with US ‘Sanders-Warren’ efforts to ‘reform’ the US Democrat party are discussed.